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pegdhcp writes with news that the UK government has signaled its intent to support a bill that would issue a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing, who is known for his work in defeating the German Enigma code machines in World War II and widely considered the father of computer science. Turing was charged with and convicted of "gross indecency" in 1952 for being gay. He was sentenced to chemical castration, and he committed suicide two years later.
"The announcement marks a change of heart by the government, which declined last year to grant pardons to the 49,000 gay men, now dead, who were convicted under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. They include Oscar Wilde. ... [Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon] told peers: "Alan Turing himself believed that homosexual activity would be made legal by a royal commission. In fact, appropriately, it was parliament which decriminalized the activity for which he was convicted. The government are very aware of the calls to pardon Turing, given his outstanding achievements, and have great sympathy with this objective That is why the government believe it is right that parliament should be free to respond to this bill in whatever way its conscience dictates and in whatever way it so wills."

He gets pardoned for his "outstanding achievements". Yet again, it isn't the Rule of Law or ethics that rules Britain, but fame. If you are famous, you get off. And if you are not famous and the law is horribly immoral, then you are fucked.

There WAS a bill last year to pardon 49,000 people, including Turing. It failed.

There is nothing in the summary or TFA that indicates whether the new bill is for that same group of 49,000, or for Turning alone. You MAY be right, but neither the summary or TFA supports that conclusion.

According to Justice Minister Lord McNally,
“It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd, particularly given his outstanding contribution to the war effort,” he said.
“However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.”

Source [forbes.com]. I guess it makes sense when you put it like that. Pardoning at best does nothing to change the people whose lives were ruined, justice is not done, it never can be. An acknowledgement that the country is capable of doing very bad things is probably better than patting ourselves on the back for fixing our grandparent's mistakes.

That's shameful. His name and reputation deserve a pardon, but so do all the others.

In a sense, since the person is not alive anymore, a post-humous pardon is mostly about showing contrition - the state's for its actions toward others - and moving forward in a better manner. By not pardoning everyone else, and singling out Turing, the state - and the society as a whole to some extent - engages in a a grubby, partisan deed and shows no contrition for the victimising activities.

I'd expect nothing less from the bunch of self-interested, unprincipled politicians who we have in parliament these days, though.

Geeks are the ones explaining in detail what GCHQ has been recording on Brits. Geeks are the ones who thought Turing was given a bad deal. So this is a fob to pretend that Cameron is somehow the friend of geeks, even as he's destroying the privacy right and making 'democracy' a joke word.

Seriously, fuck off Cameron, you were elected to fix the surveillance state, no token honor to Turing will fix what you've done Cameron, *no*, what you're *doing* Cameron. It's on-going. We get it, we voted for your to end

No. Pardon implies the action was illegal, but excusable. And the action was illegal. Whether you like the law or not, he was actually "guilty" of it, even if the law was poorly and unevenly applied.

What really needs to be understood is that being convicted doesn't make you evil. The law exists to preserve the existing order. And many times, the existing order is deficient, but must serve to maintain society until it can be changed.

The term "pardon" should stick in everyone's craw. The term belongs to another age, when royalty dare not admit that wrongs were committed. Did Alan Turing ever commit any act for which he should have said "I beg your pardon" to society? I think not. I know that pardons are granted for wrongful convictions as well as when the recipient is considered to have fulfilled their debt to society. I also know that in the UK a pardon implies moral innocence. Maybe it's silly of me to be hung up on the word itself, but I am. There ought to be a better term for nullification of convictions arising from laws which have been found to be unjust, immoral and evil, and the title of the nullification ought to make it clear that it isn't forgiveness, because the victim in these cases has done nothing which needs to be forgiven.

Think about it. Escaped slaves who were caught in the past: do we now really want to retrospectively say in magnanimity that we forgive them for escaping? If I were so descended, I would symbolically spit in the face of one so declaring in those terms.

I agree. Besides, what is the point of pardoning someone who's already dead? To be frank, even an apology is short of the mark. There is nothing they can do at this time apart from what has already been done, making this a rather futile exercise.

Agreed. In this situation, Turing doesn't need the pardon, the UK Government needs it for their crimes against humanity.

There isn't a country on the planet who hasn't, at some point in the past, committed acts that are now considered human rights violations and/or crimes against humanity. Not a one. Some of the so-called "western ideal" liberal/democracies were still committing these crimes against humanity while, at the same time, their heads of state were receiving Nobel prizes for forwarding human rights. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Canada, and more recently, the USA)

Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal apology last night on behalf of the government to Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker who took his own life 55 years ago after being sentenced to chemical castration for being gay.

Describing Turing's treatment as "horrifying" and "utterly unfair", Brown said the country owed the brilliant mathematician a huge debt. He was proud, he said, to offer an official apology. "We're sorry, you d

turin was convicted of commiting an act of gross indecency in a public place, not for being gay

Perhaps there was some person named "Turin" who was convicted of committing an act of gross indecency in a public place. Alan Turing, however, was, as I understand it, convicted of committing homosexual acts in private [polarimagazine.com].

But The fact that Anthony Blunt had friends in high places was not a military secret. To reprieve Turing would be to acknowledge the fact that Turing's work was instrumental during the war, and the Sovets should really change those locks...

The government argues that they can't pardon everyone because it would open the floodgates for anyone convicted of any crime subsequently legalized to ask for the same. To my mind that's a lame excuse for not pardoning every gay man convicted of this one specific crime.

There is no reason to pardon him. Apologize for making a bad law sure, but pardon no. It was illegal at the time, and there were no exigent circumstances requiring him to break the law for the public good. There is really no reason to offer a pardon.

...to clear Turing of having an official criminal record. The law and the criminal justice system regard you as a criminal if you break a law, whether that was a "good" law or a "bad" law. Essentially, under the legal system, there can't be any such thing as a law that's invalid because it's bad; that would undermine the whole idea of what law is. So what the pardon does is erase Turing's record of being a criminal lawbreaker without making any statement about the validity of the law he broke. That is s

Some people wear their criminal records with pride. If I was Nelson Mandela and someone wanted to take my imprisonment off my record, I'd tell them to bug off because I spent decades earning that record.

Some people are dead and their criminal records don't matter to them any more. Turing probably would have cared at the time it happened because it would have meant something for someone to stand up for him. Now?

I guess if they needed a pardon so he could have a statue or something put up, it would necessa

Why permit such revisionist history at all? If you're going to pretend he was not a criminal, then you must also pretend the government didn't convict him. Are we going to pretend the US never had slavery if Congress passes a law to posthumously free all slaves back to 1776? It's absurd. That Alan Turing was convicted of the crime of homosexuality is a historic fact and his "crimes" only reflect badly on the UK government, not on the man himself.

There is no reason to pardon him. Apologize for making a bad law sure, but pardon no. It was illegal at the time, and there were no exigent circumstances requiring him to break the law for the public good. There is really no reason to offer a pardon.

Really? "The public good" is your (only) measure of whether exercising one's rights to live one's own private life should be free from evil and infamous societal intervention and sanction? I object in the strongest possible terms.

There are other things that need our attention right now. Though having politicians spend their time on meaningless fluff rather than passing more shitty laws is probably a good thing, in general this kind of thing is just used to run interference for meaningful stuff that is going on that they don't want you to pay attention to.

As long as it's okay if someday there's a law that says there's a new time limit on issuing pardons, say, ten years, and all those convictions are then summarily reinstated. The alternative is that justice could never be final.

What you have stated is not the entire truth either. The Poles cracked Enigma by relying on a protocol weakness (the Germans sent the initial rotor setting twice). Even before cracking the naval Enigma, Turing et al devised a way to break Enigma should the Germans realise they had a vulnerability by using a known plaintext attack. The Germans changing the protocol to only send the initial rotor setting once rendered the Polish cryptanalysis unusable. They also developed the machinery needed to automate the cracking of Enigma on a far larger scale than the Poles had managed.

Exactly. Well, actually the Poles did a bit more than just what you give them credit for. They created their own reverse-engineered enigma machines (or "doubles", or "bombes"; it is not entirely clear to me which term is the most accurate) and eventually furnished them to the British.

Also, I have a reservation about the usage "cracked" or "broke" such-and-such cipher. Terms like these imply that you do the work once, and then the ciphertext is effortlessly deciphered from then on. In actuality, it is not ne

Changing the protocol made the cryptanalysis method unusable, but the real damage was done at that point.

Before WWII started, Enigma was used with the same settings for a month. After gathering about 80 encrypted messages, with only the knowledge that each message started with the letters XYZXYZ for three unknown letters X, Y, and Z, and with a bit of espionage to discover the plug connections (something that a cleaner might have written down if the machine wasn't carefully hidden away), it was possible

I think it's meaningless and a waste of time. The people in charge today didn't commit the offense, and if you want to address past offenses in UK history, a more important place to start would be at Smithfield [wikipedia.org] anyway. I am more in favor of finding people whose rights are being violated today and doing something about that.

I think it's meaningless and a waste of time. The people in charge today didn't commit the offense, and if you want to address past offenses in UK history, a more important place to start would be at Smithfield [wikipedia.org] anyway. I am more in favor of finding people whose rights are being violated today and doing something about that.

It is not meaningless. There are people in Britain and worldwide who still want to roll back the clock on gay rights. This move would signal that there is no going back by appropriately acknowledging the collective shame that Britain bears for treating their hero so poorly. It is 2013. Gay oppression is, or ought to be, a thing of the past.

You are right, but every time I see the term "gay rights", I roll my eyes. There are no "gay rights". At least those involved in integration (who mattered) didn't call it "black rights" or even "racial rights", but "civil rights". I'm pretty sure civil rights, properly interpreted, covers everything.

Everyone is due the right to conduct their personal affairs, which are absolutely no business of society, free from authorities spying, interfering, and punishing, whether those authorities are the government, t

It's too easy to end up with laws just as stupid and evil as those against "impaired driving". The wrongdoing isn't impaired driving, it's incompetent driving, incompetent for WHATEVER REASON, but even then only as a condition in an event which involves injury to other people and destruction of their property. Otherwise no wrong has been done to anyone.

I see your point, however, you should consider that this is the sort of law that by its very nature must not be written exactly at the "fence line" where impairment actually kills people. In other words, the line has to be drawn some distance over on the safe side of things. This is an inconvenience to people who can hold their liquor and drive safely, but raising the legal BAC limit would open the floodgates of homicidal drunk driving. If a mental/physical coordination test were exclusively administered

"Preventive" laws are immoral, evil, presumptive and do not work. Ever see Minority Report?

Maybe if the war of escalation in which cars are made more and more like fortresses and the occupants elaborately cushioned had never been begun, more drunk and incompetent drivers would have killed themselves, reducing the danger to others. But this is pretty far afield from the topic.

No, despite the mental masturbation exhibited at the link, it was not an "awful decision". It was an absurdly incompetent investigation, and doesn't result in any certitude, but it found the most likely cause. Yeah, it could have been an accident; it could have been murder; but more likely it was suicide. You take away from somebody who they ARE and you have taken away everything.

Don't get me wrong, I am all for sexual equality, and have nothing against gay people. But why go through and change history. At the time, it was considered illegal, and the world was a much more conservative place. Pardoning him posthumously does nothing for him, and only makes the current generation of politicians and people feel good and they did something, which in reality has no real meaning.

Don't get me wrong; I understand where you're coming from. This clearly does Turing no good at this point. But at the same time, if I lived on Adolph Hitlerstrasse, I might be very happy to have the government change the name. There's a thin line between trying to hide the past, and not wanting to celebrate past misdeeds that were once considered good.

Look at it this way: if they don't pardon Turing, then people might object to erecting a statue or naming a street after him, on the basis that he was a convi

A pardon is the government forgiving someone for doing something wrong. What the British government should do in this case is admit that the government was wrong to ever enact the statute in question, and exonerate everyone ever punished under it.

It takes all types to make the world go around so I guess you're welcome to think that but... Wow. I'm a straight up asshole and I don't even think that. Hell, I thought they'd already done this and he was pardoned and all that jazz. This is as bad as the Japanese still worshiping their WWII war criminals.

The reason given why he wasn't pardoned was so that we can accept our shameful history. Retroactively pardoning someone doesn't actually do anything... no one thinks just being gay should be illegal now in the UK (well, as close as possible to no one).

The pardon doesn't actually do anything about current issues with homosexuality, transgender issues, etc. It's just a self-congratulatory pat on the back, "weren't we awful back then", pointless exercise.

A 'private' organization that nevertheless enjoys an extremely close relationship with said government, starting with the congressional charter and extending throughout all the special treatment given to them and their members by local schools, fire and police departments, and particularly the military. People defending them are always quick to claim the BSA receives 'no federal funds' but that's not really accurate since the taxpayer pays for the schools and the schools in turn financially sponsor the loca

2. Why is it so important for gay men to get out into the woods with little boys?>

Why is it so important for men to get out into the woods with little boys?

Ah; it's the old "All gays are child molesters" trope yet again.

Actually, you should ask "Why is it so important for self-described "straight" men to get out into the woods with little boys.";-)

After all, the Boy Scouts haven't banned all gay men, only the ones who are open and honest ("out of the closet") about their predilections. They accept closeted gays as Scout leaders.

(We might also repeat the oft-noted observation that "homosexual" and "child molester" aren't synonyms. They probably aren't even correlated. There are child-molesting straight people, and gays who don't find pre-puberty children sexually attractive. If your motive is to protect the children from molestation, excluding gays has little if anything to do with such goals.)

But the main point here is that the Boy Scouts have in fact only excluded people who admit to being gay, while not paying nearly as much attention to people who claim to be straight.

Society was happier when people were focused on family and behaved in a (relatively) chaste manner.

Part of maintaining that structure requires a clear sexual values system, including a sense of what is normal.

When we go pluralistic, or make "anything goes" the new normal, this traditional order is threatened.

While I will never support the persecution of someone for being quietly gay, I think a lot of the excesses of that time were designed to counter-act the rising sexual liberation movement.

You suffer from the terrible misapprehension that there is such thing as "normal" when it comes to human sexuality, and that people have ever done anything more than pretend to conform to your mythical "chaste" behaviors. All of recorded history shows us that A) human sexuality is a spectrum that has always included things like homosexuality and B) humans are really not very good at being "chaste".

Also, last time I checked there were an awful lot of people inhabiting those "happier" time periods you refer to who were not happy at all. Quite the opposite in fact, since they were busy being persecuted for what they felt was perfectly normal.

It certainly sounds very much like you do support the persecution of anyone who doesn't fit your personal definition of "normal" or threatens your idea of harmonious social order.

More on topic: This whole thing with pardoning just Alan Turing because he happened to be a genius and helped to win a war makes me want to puke. If the law and the resulting persecution was wrong they should be apologizing and pardoning every single person who was ever prosecuted under that law. Not just Turing. What, those 49,000 others aren't good enough for a pardon? They weren't genius enough to earn an apology for being persecuted? Give me a break. If it was wrong, it was wrong. Otherwise it's just favoritism.

Part of maintaining that structure requires a clear sexual values system, including a sense of what is normal.

OK, if we need a sense of what's normal, I propose that sex that starts when the hour of the day is an even number is normal and sex that starts when the hour of the day is an odd number is not normal.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they blissfully put up blinders and pretend that nothing's happening. When I told my mom I was a lesbian, her first words were "no you aren't", and it was 5 years and many girlfriends later that she finally acknowledged that I might be queer. To this day, she still hopes I'm going to find some guy and start popping out grandkids.

Indeed, in a lot of respects, it's better for the conviction to stand as a bloody reminder of how intolerant we are.

FTFY

Don't think that because some gay people get to have the joy of marriage and subsequent divorce that we are now post-intolerance.

Pardoning a dead person of a no longer illegal act when everyone is in favor of it is more like moral masturbation. I guess it has to be done or someone might blow their top, but you didn't actually get anywhere with anyone else.